Just Like Me

I might be lonely or feeling generous when I state my name for the telemarketer and she gasps because that’s her name, too, and I wonder if tonight she’s Diane, last night Robert or Juan, and by morning, Eve. And just like me she’s a writer, making these calls to save enough to get to a program, probably Iowa, but for now she’s working on her novel, Academia Nuts, because she wants to be a professor, just like me, only with less teaching and more money. It all feels wholesome and nerdy, talking about student debt and spirituality, until she asks about my rain gutters, and I’m suddenly guarded, as if my troughs of muddy leaves dripping thick syrup onto my driveway pebbles are none of her business. I interrupt. Diane, I have to go. Grading, you know. Of course. She apologizes for taking my time. Then in the awkward silence before we hang up, the rain plinks good luck on my sagging gutters. 

DIANE LeBLANC

Diane LeBlanc is a writer, teacher, and book artist with roots in Vermont, Wyoming, and Minnesota. She is the author of The Feast Delayed (2021) and four poetry chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Mid-American Review, Ploughshares, and Southern Humanities Review, among other places. Diane is a professor and writer in residence at St. Olaf College. Read more at dianeleblancwriter.com.